Photography

Becky Bought a Death Trap

So, two years ago on Becky's 15th birthday, we gifted her a car that we'd retired. (You can read about it here.) The Barfmobile sat for 2 years, being driven up and down the driveway on occasion just to be sure it was still in good working order. It was.

So now that Becky is THISCLOSE to getting her license, we figured we needed to give the Barfmobile a good once-over to be sure it was going to be safe for the daughter to drive solo. It ran well, so we drove it to the garage with instructions to pretty much do a full inspection, plus some. It's our daughter's safety at stake.

The call from the garage was disheartening. When they put it on the lift to look at the undercarriage, the lift crashed right through the very rusted bottom, tearing brake lines and other things that were in the way.

Awesome.

I also kinda wish I could have seen that happen. Heh.

So we had no choice but to junk out the Barfmobile and start from zero in the car hunting department. God is incredibly good to us, and pretty much landed The Perfect Car right in our lap with little to no effort on our part. Its a silver Sunfire, runs super well, gets good gas mileage, and has a sunroof. AND it was in our price range, which is equivalent to HAHAHAHAYEHRIGHT.

Becky is especially thrilled with the sunroof. It's the second best feature. The first is the awesome gas mileage. She's my daughter from top to bottom, she is. When I car shop, the first thing I ask, while Sam is still in the kicking tires stage, is, "what gas mileage does this get?" If it's not an acceptable answer to me, I make Sam find new tires to kick.

So we picked up this car over the weekend, and Becky took us for a drive to Dairy Queen. Being a nice, sunny, Sunday afternoon, she pulled back the sunroof shade and cracked the window a bit. I rolled down my window and she rolled down hers, and we took off up the drive.

Micah was in rare form, let me tell you. Grump about this and grumble about that and WHAT THE HECK IS THAT HOLE IN THE CEILING FOR OH MY WORD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE. So, knowing that he's the boy who lives to put his head out open windows, Becky opened the sunroof a bit further to show him that it was a window, and it's okay.

Except it wasn't okay. At all. Micah started to go into panic mode, with stiff arms and flapping hands, face frozen in horror, nearly hyperventilating in his fear. He was not down with windows in the roof.

Becky tried to show him how fun it was by putting her hand up through The Gaping Hole of Death, and the look on Micah's face would have been hysterical if it hadn't been heartbreaking. He had to literally turn his head from the imminent demise of Becky's hand being sucked up into the vortex of space. I could see him looking for a door handle to let himself out of a moving car. Thank goodness the car is a 2-door and the handle wasn't accessible to him.

We had to close the sunroof. And the shade. And Micah wasn't happy until both my window and Becky's window were rolled all the way up. Did I mention that it was a hot and sunny Sunday afternoon?

While it was evident that the boy was in desperate need of a nap, it's also evident that he'll be needing to get used to a hole in the roof of the car. That sunroof will be all sorts of fun this summer, but only if it's open.